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Mainframes and micros; the best of both worlds

By Lori Ratajczata and Bob Lakata

If you are like most administrators at Penn, you have a desktop computer. You probably use it for word processing and spreadsheet analysis, and you may have created some databases for yourself. You may also use your desktop computer to connect to an electronic mail facility, or to access the University's financial system or some other system on the administrative mainframe computer (UMIS).

When you aren't taking your desktop computer for granted, you probably can't imagine how you got along without it. In the world of the microcomputer, you can get software that's designed to be easy to use, and you can customize your system based on your personal preferences. You can use 100 percent of your system resources without causing any inconvenience to other computer users. And once you've paid for your system, the only recurring bill is for electricity--there are no monthly bills for processing time, etc. The computing power of your desktop machine far surpasses that of the mainframe computers of old, and the price per machine cycle on your PC is far less than on a mainframe today.

Yet sometimes you may be frustrated by the limitations of your desktop machine. You may dream of what you could do if your system were more powerful. Or you may hear of what other people are accomplishing with larger systems and wonder whether you might not want to do something similar. But all you have to work with is what's on your desktop, right?

Wrong! With a PennNet connection, you have access to a number of other machines--workstations, minicomputers, and mainframes. (PennNet will get you at least as far as "knocking on the door"; you may need a logon id and/or other security clearance to actually gain entry.) One of these is IVY, also known as the UMIS machine, or the administrative mainframe computer. The world of the mainframe beckons.

Ivy offers data access

IVY also serves as a file repository, storing data files that are too big for a personal computer. If your data is start-ing to fill up your hard drive, consider uploading it to IVY.

Files stored on IVY are backed up for you on a regular basis. (If the first computer you ever used was a mainframe, that may explain why you don't back up your desktop computer files as often as you should!)

Microcomputer users often give each other machine-readable files in the form of ASCII files on floppy disks. But have you ever requested machine-readable files from someone who sent them to you on tape? If the tape came from an IBM mainframe, the files are probably written using the EBCDIC character set (which includes about twice as many characters as the ASCII character set). EBCDIC files on tape (reel or cassette) can be read on IVY. You can also use IVY to write data to a tape so it can be sent to someone at another site.

Data stored on IVY can be made available to any IVY user. If more than one person needs to share data, it may make sense to store it on IVY rather than storing it on a server you'd have to pay for and operate yourself.

Files stored on IVY can be secured. You can specify who can write to your file, who can read it, and who cannot access it at all. Depending on the software you use, you can specify that someone be given access only to certain records in your data file, or only to certain fields within the records.

IVY offers software that can help you ensure data integrity. This software enables you to write file maintenance programs that check the data being entered and allow only valid data to be written to your file.

You can use IVY to analyze data stored there. But if you want to do a lot of analysis on a subset of a file, it's a good idea to extract the subset into a file that you transfer to your desktop for processing there. ProComm and MicroPhone users use Kermit to transfer their files, but users with Ethernet boards in their PCs can use FTP, which is much faster. Several Penn administrators, for example, extract financial data for their departments, download it, and import it into spreadsheets for analysis.

IVY offers software access

Technical support on IVY

Printing support on IVY

You may already have output printed at UMIS but don't like hiking there to pick it up. Did you know that you can have a desktop printer set up as a UMIS local printer and direct your output there? Several offices find that this saves them time and keeps confidential reports more secure.

More about IVY